------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 20, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
NYC MAYOR TO TAKE OVER SCHOOLS: TEACHERS GET CONTRACT, AT A PRICE By Greg Butterfield New York City New York City Mayor Michael Bloom berg and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) reached a tentative contract agreement on June 10. Eighty thousand public school teachers represented by the UFT have worked without a contract for 19 months. The agreement comes as the city faces a severe teacher shortage for the coming school year. The long-delayed settlement follows a massive protest against threatened budget cuts to city schools. Responding to Bloom berg's plan to chop another $350 million from classrooms, hip-hop artists and celebrities joined students, teachers and parents who rallied at City Hall June 4. The rally was cosponsored by the UFT, Alliance for Quality Education and Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. Estimates of the turnout ranged as high as 100,000. It was by far the biggest protest against budget cuts in recent years and the largest demonstration in the city since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Bloomberg held the education budget hostage to get full control of the public school system. On June 6 he got his wish. Republican and Democratic leaders in Albany, the state capital, agreed to end some of the last vestiges of community control of schools won by communities of color in the 1960s. The power to make policy decisions, allocate school funds, and much more will be stripped from the Board of Education and given to the mayor. Thirty-two community school boards will be abolished next year. More than 84 percent of the city's 1.1 million public school students are people of color--nearly all from working class families. Their teachers are among the lowest paid in the state. Their schools are overcrowded and often dilapidated. Their classrooms consistently receive less money per student than schools in predominately white, affluent and suburban areas. Will this white billionaire mayor make decisions that benefit these students and their desire to get a good education and good jobs? Or will he make decisions that benefit his ruling-class friends looking for fat contracts at public education's expense? TEACHER PAY TO RISE The UFT announced the tentative contract on its Web site. It includes an across-the-board pay increase of 16 percent. Some published reports say newer teachers would receive bigger increases. The starting salary for new teachers would be $39,000 per year, a 22-percent increase. The starting salary would be more competitive with schools in nearby cities and towns, but still significantly less than affluent upstate districts. Other features of the contract are not favorable to teachers. Their workweek would increase by 100 minutes. Superintendents of the city's 32 school districts will decide whether teachers should work 20 extra minutes each day or two 50-minute blocks per week. The union also made concessions on work rules. It would be easier for management to fire teachers or suspend them for up to 90 days. It would be easier for school administrators to assign teachers to non-teaching tasks. The union's delegates assembly is scheduled to vote on the contract June 12. If they approve it, the offer must still be ratified by the membership. Bloomberg, who stonewalled the teachers' union all winter, didn't want to give them as much as he did. And he didn't get all the concessions he wanted, either. In May the UFT delegates' assembly overwhelmingly authorized a strike vote. Prior to the settlement, the union predicted a large majority of its members would back a strike, despite the harsh penalties imposed on public workers who strike under New York State's Taylor Law. Two-thirds of New Yorkers polled said they would support a strike. The mayor goaded the union, daring the teachers' union to strike, while holding the Taylor Law over their heads: lose two days' pay for every day on strike and face jail time. But Bloomberg ran into a brick wall: the teacher shortage. Low pay and bad working conditions have led to an exodus of teachers from city schools. The city needs 10,000 new public school teachers for fall 2002. DANGER AHEAD Rudolph Giuliani, Bloomberg's predecessor, had long sought to dismantle the Board of Education and 32 community school boards. Giuliani and his Wall Street backers viewed mayoral domination of the pubic schools as a means to introduce privatization, vouchers for religious schools, and as a weapon against the UFT. Under Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki, standardized testing became the be-all and end-all of public education in the city, forcing teachers to "teach to the test." Many educators say the tests are culturally biased against students who are not from white, affluent backgrounds. Bloomberg picked up these crusades. He said his term of office should be judged on whether scores rose on standardized tests. He also said he wants to run the schools like a business. And he held the schools budget hostage to get his way. The June 11 New York Times noted, "now that Mayor Bloomberg is poised to win control of the school system...the mayor has agreed to restore the roughly $350 million that he had previously planned to cut from the Board of Education." He reserves the right to make cuts in case of "economic emergency." This should be a warning signal to the UFT that Bloomberg is not to be trusted. The bipartisan agreement to give the mayor's office complete control of the public schools will give Bloomberg more leverage to hire and fire teachers, force educators to "teach to the test" and demand more union concessions. The tentative contract, if approved, is mostly retroactive. It will expire in May 2003. That means contract negotiations will start again by the end of the year. Bloomberg's supporters are already laying out their priorities for the next contract: undermining seniority rights, for example, and introducing merit pay for teachers in schools that focus on higher test scores only. But already the potential for a community/labor fight-back is evident. This tentative contract is not the end, but the beginning of a new struggle to save and improve public education. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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